Phil and Hal became friends quickly, even though they had been born thirty years apart. Their bond was rooted in the fact that they both got their start in tactical SIGINT (officer specialty code thirty-five career-tracked) and had eventually migrated into the CI/HUMINT field.
The offices for DCS Task Group Tall Oak–Washington were inside one of the three Stryker Brigade headquarters at Fort Lewis. Three of the U.S. Army’s seven Stryker Brigades were based at JBLM. The brigade headquarters building was the ideal place for the Tall Oak Section to hide its SCIF (spoken “skiff”) in plain sight. It was already classified as a “U.S.-Controlled Facility,” so that made SCIF accreditation easier. The Tall Oak staff could walk in and out of the building at any hour of the day or night in civilian clothes without arousing any suspicion.
The Tall Oak–Washington outer office measured only ten feet by ten feet and had just one small desk, a coat rack, a wall-mounted set of horizontal cubby shelves, and a pistol-clearing tube. Its main purpose was to shield the SCIF inner door from the view of casual passersby in the hall. The outer door was solid core oak and had a cipher lock. The outer office was their nondiscussion area, where classified discussions were not authorized because it lacked adequate sound attenuation.
Between the outer office and the SCIF itself was a six-by-six-foot security vestibule. This vestibule was monitored with a closed-circuit television camera and was controlled by an electronic latch release with a loud buzzer during the day, and by a second cipher lock with a distinct combination after hours. Then came the heavy steel vault door itself.
Behind the proverbial “Green Door,” the SCIF was a drab, windowless space that felt claustrophobic despite the high ceiling. The only large adornments were two large maps—a world map and a map of the Pacific Northwest—mounted on foam-core backings. There were two OPSEC reminder posters, a DCS core values poster, and a DCS mission statement poster. The office’s only decorative ficus tree with plastic leaves looked comically out of place. Years before Phil arrived, some wag had taped a sign reading, DO NOT OVER-WATER onto its trunk.
The SCIF was permeated with the smell of coffee but also had a faint smell of tobacco, which came from Hal Jensen’s clothes. (He still grumbled about being forced to smoke outdoors.) The SCIF was not a quiet place. There was the constant hum of the fluorescent light fixture ballasts and the whir of more than a dozen muffin fans, which were cooling the many computers. The other noise source in the SCIF was the constant soft rushing sound of the DIAM-mandated white-noise generators, made by a company called Florida Sound Masking. This system was designed to foil any potential eavesdropping.
The SCIF’s Comm Center was dominated by a three-sided ring of eight-foot tables. Atop these tables were six computer monitors, two large tabletop printers, a document scanner, a Defense Red Switch Network (DRSN) telephone, and a STU-III secure telephone with an attached speakerphone. The six prominently labeled monitors each had a specific communications and data retrieval function: JWICS, DCS WAN, SIPRNet, Tall Oak LAN/Operations Net, READOUT Multi-Net, and NSANet. Because Tall Oak was a “multiple INTs” shop, it had better connectivity than many U.S. Army command headquarters.
Emanations security was an obsession in the American intelligence community in part because they had exploited emanations so thoroughly in East Germany in the 1960s. Recognizing their own vulnerability, TEMPEST teams did regular sweeps of all SCIFs, using a strange-looking assortment of spectrum analyzers with specialized antennas.
Adjoining the Comm Center was a 230-square-foot conference room containing a long oak table topped by a large triskelion-shaped Polycom speakerphone. A twenty-four-inch flat-panel monitor with integral camera was mounted on the partition wall that divided the conference room from the Comm Center. This recent addition was an encrypted video system that could be linked directly to the other Tall Oak offices or to a Defense Intelligence Operations Coordination Center (DIOCC) Workroom in the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center (DIAC) at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling (JBAB) in Washington, D.C.
The other four Tall Oak offices on the West Coast covered San Diego, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area, and Portland. The largest of these was in Sunnyvale, California, and had been nicknamed the Beehive, both because it had a staff of thirty-five people and a constant stream of visitors flying in from DIAC, and for its large number of agents who had been raised in Mormon families.
Unlike the smaller Washington office, the Sunnyvale Tall Oak office was considered a Continuous Operation, with a SCIF operated twenty-four hours a day. It was located in a large, nondescript one-story office building with a sign vaguely identifying it as Williams Design Group. The front lobby had the familiar “California Corporate” look, but just to the right of the front desk was a heavy door that led to a Honeywell Man Trap entrance. Beyond that was a three-way hall intersection that led to the nonsecure offices on the right and left, and to the SCIF, directly ahead. The core of the Sunnyvale building was a forty-five-hundred-square-foot windowless SCIF, which included an open-storage workroom.
Silicon Valley was a major target for foreign industrial espionage. The Beehive was located just a mile from Apple Computer’s recently completed main headquarters building, “The One Ring.” The Sunnyvale staff enjoyed warm weather and blue skies but also suffered a lot of traffic snarls. Their FBI counterparts were located nine miles away in Campbell, California. Nine miles was considered a just barely comfortable distance. The Beehive wanted to keep relations between their respective operations “courteous but distinct and geographically detached.” Privately, they considered the FBI’s CI agents a posse of bumbling buffoons.
Similarly, the Tall Oak–Washington staff at JBLM was happy to have the nearest FBI office thirty-eight miles away, on Third Avenue in downtown Seattle. Ironically, the Tall Oakers actually had much more cooperative working relationships with the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), in Burnaby, British Columbia. As Phil put it, “At least the Canadians know how to keep their mouths shut.” On many occasions, they had proven themselves worthy of mutual respect.
Tall Oakers worked in plainclothes and investigated national security crimes and violations of the UCMJ, within U.S. military CI jurisdiction. But unlike their active-duty army “Strat” CI counterparts, the Tall Oakers had more of a focus on industrial espionage. Their “cover” story at JBLM was that they exclusively did purely preventive work like SAEDA briefings. But in actuality, their lives were a bit more exciting, but only occasionally dangerous.
The acronym CI/HUMINT was often spoken in the same breath, but the two roles were actually distinct. The old saying in the Army intelligence community was, “If you want to try to do some Agent 007 stuff, then go HUMINT. But if you want to try to catch people who are trying to do 007 stuff, then go CI.” The rule was that a HUMINTer couldn’t do investigations and a CI special agent couldn’t do interrogations. With Task Group Tall Oak, Washington, that distinction was blurred, since some of their taskings were HUMINT (rather than CI), and the Tall Oakers did indeed interrogate turned assets.
The leeway in Tall Oak’s mission came by virtue of both their specific taskings and the fact that they were contractors, selectively operating under either Title 50 or Title 10, as needed. (Title 50 was the portion of the U.S. Code that governed the legal authority of the CIA, NSA, and NRO, whereas Title 10 governed and authorized the Armed Forces.) It also helped that their chain of command jumped directly to DIA headquarters at JBAB in Washington, D.C., rather than being under the control of a regional Army command.